Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 22

Game review: Invisible, Inc. for Steam

I got Invisible, Inc. pretty soon after it came out of Steam’s early access based on glowing praise from Angry Joe. I was a little wary of it because it’s from Klei, and Mark of the Ninja didn’t impress me. But I figured I’d give this a chance because it’s got a very different game play method and seems to be better at allowing players to make it through the whole game without killing anyone. This can be a compelling selling point for me all by itself, so that was my main reason for picking this up.

The thing is, I played maybe three missions before realizing I’d made a tactical error early on and couldn’t continue my current game. I deleted the save file, and for several months I procrastinated getting back in for another attempt. I knew I should just push through because it is a pretty short game, and yet, I always found something else to distract myself with. But at long last, I’ve sat down with the game and given it a full spin. Was it worth it? Uh…well, yes and no. Mostly yes, and I admit I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Mark of the Ninja. But that ending…

I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to digress.

A turn-based game, you start off with two agents after your private spy agency is infiltrated by initially unnamed corporations. The leader of your organization saves herself and the company’s highly sophisticated mainframe computer, uploading its AI onto a flying fortress. This gives the AI just 72 hours of power, and that being the case, you have to find a new network to put the AI in. To do that, you have to take a number of missions to equip your agents, free others from corporate holding cells, and pinpoint the location of a suitable server host. Once you do all of that, it’s time to get ready for the final showdown.

It’s mostly good, with solid game play, good graphics and animations, and a relatively forgiving learning curve. While the item shop between levels is kind of weak, there are machines in the levels with much better selections. The prices aren’t too steep, so it’s possible to pick up enough equipment for all your agents without skimping on anyone so long as you break into a few safes and remember to mug the guards you knock out using tasers.

Knocking out the guards means they will wake up in a certain number of turns unless you keep them pinned down. The number of turns is based on the difficulty level, and can also be influenced by augmentations on your agents. So for instance, one agent might only be able to put a guard down for 2 turns, while another might be able to keep them down for 4.

Agents move based on their Action Points, and this can be upgraded between levels for credits. So there’s this tricky balance of trying to buy equipment while at the same time keeping enough funds to upgrade their stats. You start off with two agents, but you can also free operatives from holding facilities. These are optional, by the way. You choose what resources you want to improve, and if you decide to just buff up your two primary agents, well you can do that. In my opinion, that would make the final showdown extremely difficult, but I’m sure some of the more hardcore gamers out there can do it easily. For someone of my more mundane skill set, it’s a task too difficult to accomplish.

Along with your agents, you’re also assisted by the AI, which can hack cameras and drones to help you bypass them, or to unlock sensors on safes so your operatives can crack them. The AI’s abilities are available through another form of AP, Power, and it’s possible to pick up more Power within the levels using terminals, or through abilities of your agents. The AI also has an ability that will let it gather one point per turn, but if you get all the way down to zero and have to wait to recover, things can turn ugly fast.

That’s the whole game in a nutshells. Sneak into offices and tiptoe around guards and electronic defenses until you can reach your goal. Once you find it, you have to locate a transport room, often going back through the same guards and some newly arrived backup units. The longer you take to play a level, the more resistance you find due to an ever rising alert level, so sticking around to hunt for credits or extra terminals can be risky. Which is really the point. Are you the kind of player to rush in and dash back out with just the barest minimum of items gathered? Or are you feeling brave enough to poke around and look for that last safe that might have some lovely new equipment for your people?

Now, for the most part, I liked every mission except for the last. Sure, the levels are tricky, and being procedurally generated means that no level is the same if you have to repeat it for whatever reason. And this is cool, and I can see how this would appeal to lots of folks.

But that final level…it goes up in a huge difficulty spike that put me at risk of cracking my dentures. It stops being fun and is just one long painful slog. It also doesn’t help that the basic equipment most agents have no longer works against the guards, and the defense of the most important “free agent” requires pushing back larger and larger waves of enemies.

Should you manage to win, the game has one final cut scene that’s pure indie. Which is to say you win, but you lose. Everybody dies, the world sucks, and thank you for playing. I really wish indies would stop doing this, especially after ramping up the difficulty and making me work so hard for what amounts to a pair of middle fingers stuck in my face. I wouldn’t say it completely ruins the game, but it certainly does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Still, that’s like the last minute of an otherwise decent time, which for me lasted around 7 hours. Players of higher skill will probably whip through this whole campaign in 2, and I think the replayability is supposed to come from the procedural levels and the ability to set the difficulty in increasing increments. But for me, the appeal has already worn off. It’s not a bad game, and I don’t feel I wasted my money. But it’s not something that I’ll go back to play over and over like Spelunky.

I will give Invisible, Inc. 4 stars and recommend it to fans of turn-based combat games. It might not last you long, but it’s relatively cheap and should help fill up some space while you’re waiting for other games to come out.

Book review: Devil’s Paw by Debra Dunbar

Devil’s Paw is the fourth book in the Imp series by Debra Dunbar, and it’s both a fantastic read and a frustrating one as well. It builds on previous stories and makes Sam’s growth as the Iblis a major part of the plot. Angel Gregory shows up with another drained demon, and with more victims piled up, including an angel. Sam’s got her hands full trying to solve this mystery while at the same time dealing with problems with Wyatt’s “half-sister” Amber. Sam has also managed to swing a deal with the elves to find Wyatt’s biological sister, Nyalla, and free her from a life of slavery in Hel. On top of all this, she’s still got a stack of paperwork to fill out over the humans she’s killed in the past.

Most of these subplots fall by the wayside without resolution because the mystery of who is draining demons and angels must be solved before someone tries to frame Sam as the culprit. (These problems are actually covered in spin-off books in the series, but I haven’t read those yet, only the blurbs.) Sam and Gregory go globe hopping to track down a suspect, and while Gregory is satisfied to call it a closed case, Sam goes off on her own to keep looking for the real mastermind behind this plot.

This is where things get frustrating because there’s a recurring trait in that Sam never really takes anything seriously until she’s half dead. It’s all fun and games until someone’s soul is disintegrating, you know? That’s been the case several times before, but this time around, the way Sam stumbles into this mess and almost gets herself killed had me groaning, “how do you even survive a week?”

The book concludes with something of a cliffhanger, and yeah, I’m very much invested in seeing what happens next. But I sometimes wish Sam’s slow growth would eventually include an improved survival instinct.

Anywho, I give Devil’s Paw 4 stars, and I’m looking forward to Imp Forsaken.

Game review: Fallout Shelter for Android

Let me begin this review with a bit of full disclosure: I do not like Bethesda games. I’ve given almost all of them a try because my husband buys them, usually even multiple copies so he can have one for his computer and one for our console. So yes, I give their games a trial run, and each time, what amazes me most of all is how very little effort they put into anything they do, and how very rabid the fan base responds to their games. “Game of the year!” they cry, despite the fact that a dozen other candidates come out with better graphics, game play, writing, stability… *takes deep breath*

So anyway, hubby found an app called Bluestacks that allowed him to download and play Fallout Shelter on his computer, and after playing it a few days, he said I should check it out. I watched him play, and because I’d been standing behind him for nearly an hour, he said, “It’s kind of hypnotic, isn’t it?” And it is, so I decided to download it and give it a try. What I found is a game that I simultaneously like and loathe at the same time. All the reasons I hate it can be summed up in the same way, that it’s a Bethesda game, and like all their games, they put just enough effort into it to make sure it didn’t crash constantly. But beyond that? Beyond that, it’s a wonky piece of shit.

I have a long, LONG list of complaints about this game, but I should get out of the way the things I liked, which were strong enough to keep me playing until I finally unlocked the Nuka-Cola plant, the last room you can build in your vault. For starters, I like the basic premise of building your own vault and either luring in dwellers or convincing your people to mate and make new dwellers. I like the gathering of resources, and as my hubby says, it becomes hypnotic to just click on items as they become available, or to ding through the various objectives assigned for the rewards of bottle caps (the game’s currency) or lunchboxes (the random loot crate that can be won for free or purchased for real money. More on that later, and on why you should NEVER give money for these boxes.)

I like the graphics, from the cute designs of the dwellers and their enemies to the rooms in their three levels of production quality. I like how detailed everything is when you zoom in close, and I like how the rooms have a kind of depth and perspective that changes as you move around the screen. I like the goofy conversations the dwellers have with each other and how the same questions or comments often have multiple responses to keep conversations from getting stale too quickly. If all the game involved was gathering resources and watching dwellers interact with each other, this would probably be the first Bethesda game that I grudgingly called good.

BUT, right off the bat, it must be pointed out that the controls are fiddly as fuck, and while this mostly isn’t a problem while playing the Sim-Vault resource collection game, soon the vault is being attacked, and then those controls are a pain in the ass. If I need to move the background around to find a specific room or dweller, I can be sure I will somehow grab a random dweller and drop them in a another room without meaning to. If I need to move a dweller to shore up my defenses quickly, I will see them highlighted sure enough, but then the background will move, and the dweller won’t. I can do this several times for the same dweller, usually up to the point where the situation has become dire and I’m losing other people in the next room due to the game’s refusal to let me drag one stupid motherfucker half an inch over.

Even in situations where I don’t need speed, the interface is a joke. As resources are made available, they flash big green icons over the room. But more often than not, tapping those icons actually selects the dweller underneath or on either side of it, or even more bizarrely, from the next room over, even if it shouldn’t be possible from that angle. I’ve even tried clicking the edge of a room with resources ready for harvest, only to select a dweller TWO ROOMS OVER. Each time this happened, I was reduced to baffled utterances of half words like “Buh wha da fuh?”

Rooms can be built as a single space to accommodate two workers, or they can be merged to allow you to add four or six people and in some cases double and triple production. I say some because the rooms for making Stim-Packs (health potions) and Rad-Away (mostly useless for everyone except people you send out of the vault) make exactly the same amount regardless of room size. As an added gotcha, the first of these rooms gives you storage for 15 items, while every room after that only gives 10. Upgrading these rooms does nothing to improve storage. Why? Fucked if I know.

For the other rooms, merging two or three rooms may be better for productive efficiency, but it puts you at a tactical disadvantage in any fight. This is because in a single room with two dwellers, when a threat enters the room, your people will generally stand on opposite sides of the room for most of the fight, making it easy to see their health meters and apply health packs as needed. In merged rooms, the extra space available to your dwellers is meaningless because they will always cluster up in one spot. This means that you cannot see the health of anyone but the guy closest to the foreground, and you cannot heal anyone but him either. While it’s true that death is forgiving and you can revive people for caps, that shit gets expensive in a hurry, and it’s aggravating to be unable to move people around just so you can heal the one dweller who desperately needs it. It’s like the game makers are actively trolling you with every fight.

Even in single-room fights, it’s possible to have people cluster up and prevent you from selecting one or the other. It’s also possible that the game will glitch and decide not to show the health of anyone in the room. Or it might glitch and not let you select anyone. Oh, and did I mention that when you click on someone, it might not select them at first? Yeah, so you have to click, check to see if they got selected, and click them again if it didn’t work. You might also have to do this while they’re moving, and you’ll go to click on them right as someone else runs in front of them and heal someone who didn’t need it. While you’re chasing around that poor schmuck, he’ll die, leaving you gurgling half formed cuss words.

I know I’m not alone is this anger because I can tell exactly when the same thing happens to hubby even from the next room. He starts growling and cussing for the same reasons, and I’ll walk over to see him fuming while his people hump into a clusterfuck in one corner of the room.

This game is a half baked piece of shit, nothing more, and nothing less. Until the last update was added, the equipment, stats, and level of dwellers was meaningless. A level 40 dweller with high stats and combat armor could be placed in a room with a level 1 dweller with flat stats and no armor, and they would lose health at the exact same rate. This game has been running for a while now, and no one reviewing it at release felt compelled to mention this glaring oversight? And yes, it works differently now, but that’s after I’d already been playing it for two weeks, and I’m coming to this game a lot later than most reviewers. That shit should have been fixed before it shipped, yo.

Let me say something else about my first two weeks in the game. Initially, I did the objectives given to me regardless of what they asked. Well they asked me to mate my dwellers over and over and over, and I couldn’t supply enough weapons to all those people. So when the death claws showed up, they ripped through my vault of defenseless dwellers and murdered everyone top to bottom. I spent hours earning the caps to revive everyone, and I’d just gotten back enough caps to think about adding a training room for all these dumb little dwellers when the death claws showed up again. I still didn’t have any guns to stop them, so I said fuck it and I started a new vault. That second time through, I got real fucking tired of the objectives. Get X dweller females pregnant. Deliver X dweller babies. Get X male and females couples to dance. (Because dancing is basically foreplay.) The game started to sound like a neurotic mother-in-law with a barren womb. “MAKE ME MORE BABIES! FUCK YOUR RATE OF SURVIVAL MAKE ME MORE BAAAAABIEEEEEES!!!!”

I did not move ahead in recruiting or making more people until I had a small cache of weapons, and wouldn’t you know it? Once you ignore the game and play it right, all the threats become meaningless because guns. Got any problem in life? More guns must be the answer. Why? Because guns, that’s why.

Oh, and the game’s tips on the loading screen are actively lying to you. Stats affect how your people do in the wasteland? No, not really. The longer a dweller spends in the wasteland, the better equipment they’ll find? Also bullshit. You can send a complete novice with no armor and no gun out, and they can luck out and find something awesome. You can spend days or even weeks fluffing the stats of a dweller and send them out at a high level, and after 48 fucking hours in the field, they’ll still be finding rusty B.B. guns. Hubby was particularly dismayed to find that after sending out his best guy for 50 hours, the biggest weapon he found was an ultra rare…armor piercing B.B. gun. Even the name is fucking trolling him.

Then there’s the sexism. It first became apparent when hubby found a “Mayor Suit” that could only be worn by men. He told me about that, and I said, “So, what? Women can’t be mayors? That’s kinda sexist.” At the time, though, I hadn’t been playing long enough to unlock any of these special outfits to know how far reaching the problem is. And it’s pretty fucking huge. Women can’t be ninjas, or wrestlers, or clergy, or royalty. There are women’s-only outfits as well, and they all look about like you’d expect. Which is to say stereotypically sexist. Hubby, hoping to quell my anger, said, “Well, but both men and women can wear the nightwear.” YEAH, ABOUT THAT. When men put on the outfit, it’s a full set of pajamas that cover everything but their head, hands, and feet. When women put it on, it’s a teddy and a fucking garter belt.

“But Zoe,” you say, “It’s only a costume.” That’s exactly my point. It’s just a set of clothing that magically alters the stats of the wearer. A clergy uniform is not supplied by a church. It’s just some shit one of your people found in a storage locker. So why can’t a women wear the clergy uniform? Why can’t they be a ninja, or a wrestler? Why can’t the dudes wear the dresses? It’s all just clothing, so what gives with the enforced sexism? And why the fuck does the same set of pajamas look so radically different on women than it does on men?

It gets worse, though, because women who become pregnant default to the behavior of children. When threatened in any way, they will run screaming from the room and hide in the nearest quarters. Were there even any women involved in the design of this game? And if yes, why didn’t any of them go, “Hey guys, some of these ideas are really bad”?

And the game is a sausage fest. In all the time I played, not once did I unlock any women characters from the lunchboxes. I know there has to be some because one of my friends online bragged about getting Amata as an early lunchbox draw. But in my game, and in hubby’s, I have never seen a woman character appear from a lunchbox.

In my game, not only did I fail to get any women out of the lunchboxes, but the few dwellers who arrived from outside were all dudes. I had three full generations of dudes come from mating, and at this point, I snapped and decided to form a militant matriarchy. I grabbed every last dude with a bald head or a comb-over, stripped them of guns and outfits, and sent their sorry asses naked into the wastelands to die. Then I set up a radio studio, and any time a dude showed up, I took him into the first room, turned his ass around, and sent him right back outside to die. If a dude was born who was bald or had a comb-over, I sent that poor bastard out to die. There’s only one guy I let back in because he survived with no health packs for 9 hours and managed to go from level 10 to level 25 while picking up an outfit and a great gun. His sheer determination not to die impressed me, so I called him back in and let him live.

Before I conclude this, I need to talk about lunchboxes, which are given randomly for completing objectives or can be bought for real cash. DON’T DO THAT. The ads in-game tell you that every pack is “guaranteed to contain a rare card.” Well my friends, 500 bottle caps counts as a fucking rare card, and while that shit might seem useful when you first open the game, by the end of your first week, 500 caps is motherfucking chump change, and it’s an insult that you might have paid real world cash for that shit. It’s no less aggravating when you get it for free, but at least then you aren’t wasting your money.

I need to stress this point. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON LUNCHBOXES. The lunchboxes might very rarely have a really good gun or armor that would take you forever to find in the wasteland, but more often than not they give out food, water, Stim-Packs, Rad-Away, and caps. This is all shit you’ll produce on your own easily. If Bethesda had wanted to make buying these boxes a worthwhile investment, they should have made them drop only weapons, armor, and dwellers. That they added useless shit, and that 9 out of 10 boxes contain all useless shit, only helps to bolster my theory that the company is actively tolling its own fans. “Yes, please give us money. We guarantee you’ll find something rare…oh look it’s rare garbage! HAHAHA! Thanks, SUCKERS.”

I finally unlocked the Nuka-Cola plant, and now I’m shutting down the game and uninstalling it. I have zero desire to ever touch this hot mess again. I thought perhaps I might be alone in my feelings, but looking at the comments of several articles about the game revealed that this has left even dedicated Bethesda fans feeling more than a little “meh.” They have good reasons to feel that way. The basic premise of this game is good, but it’s thrown together with little thought, no depth, and with an obvious ploy to get people to open their wallets and be ripped off for their troubles.

To me, that makes it a typical Bethesda game. This is the company that releases a buggy mess with shit graphics and game play and lets the modding community fix their shit to make it playable. So am I surprised that their free-to-play game is shit? No. The only thing that’s surprising me is that the die-hard fans I expected to call it GOTY are instead going, “Wait, that’s it?”

I give Fallout Shelter 2 stars and all of my undying contempt. Play this if you are bored and waiting for something else to come out, but do not spend money on it and encourage these people to pursue this business model with another half baked piece of shit.

Book review: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Buried Giant is a book I picked up based more on complaints than on praise, having seen a number of reviewers say this was nothing at all like Ishiguro’s other works. I have not read anything else by the author, but I do not consider a change in style to be a bad thing. I thought perhaps I might start here and later on read more books to form a basis for comparison.

Coming into this story, it begins somewhat ambiguous and hazy, and as I read on, I found that every single last character is an unreliable narrator. Part of this is explained in the story itself as part of the over-arcing plot. Part of it has to do with the roles two of the characters have to fulfill even as they speak to each other like allies and friends. Ultimately, this ambiguity and unreliable narration make for a slow and sometimes irritating read, because even as the characters confess that this time, they’re really telling the truth, you can’t be sure, and yes, it’s revealed that they’re lying once again. The ending is equally ambiguous and feels like just another lie, and so what seemed at first like a triumphant victory is instead a dreary opening to more and more tragedies.

This is not to say I did not enjoy the journey. All of the characters are interesting, and the setting in the times after the death of King Arthur is a welcome change of pace from my usual modern reading fare. But the hope I invested in the characters feels wasted by the ending, in which every good deed is done not to ensure peace, but to bring about more hatred and animosity between all people. And this elderly couple I’ve followed with some hope of resolution to their past is instead denied, their fates are left in the hands of yet another unreliable narrator.

“But the ending is ambiguous,” one might say. “It is open to interpretation.” No, it isn’t. The very early chapters establish the working routines of certain characters, and knowing their methods, it becomes quite clear the last narrator is lying not only to the characters, but to the reader as well. Thus, a story that begins in hope of redemption ends in destruction, death, and isolation.

Not every story has to end happily ever after, and I did enjoy the story, even if the ending left me feeling cheated. So I’ll give The Buried Giant 4 stars, and I can say for certain that this will not be the last book I’ll read from Kazuo Ishiguro.

Book review: More Than This by Patrick Ness

I need to begin this review with a warning that it contains spoilers for most of the book. Normally I hate to do this, but to talk about the parts that bugged me, I have to “go there” and cover the major plot points. So this is you only warning to skip this review if you want to go into this book and be surprised.

With that out of the way, last week, hubby and I went to meet a friend downtown, and he said he needed a travel book. So I suggested we go to the local Feltrinelli, which has a rather huge selection of books in English. While hunting for a new book, I saw More Than This, and even before I saw the title or the author, I read a blurb from John Green: “Just read it.” I do like John Green’s books, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t steer me wrong. So I bought the book, and I started reading while walking behind my husband and his friend. I spent the entire tip downtown reading, and when I got home, I dropped the other books I was reading for “just one more chapter.”

The first hundred and forty pages really sucked me into this story because after the main character Seth Wearing drowns, it seems like he somehow wakes up in hell. Each time he sleeps, he has flashbacks to his old life, and all of the characters in these flashbacks are interesting and helped keep my attention.

But somewhere around page 150 comes the introduction of Regine and Tomasz, who reveal that this is not hell, but the real world, and everyone else in inside a virtual reality simulation. So this is the YA Matrix, but with less plausible explanations for everything.

Don’t get me wrong. The characters are still just as good after the big reveal. I love the back story for Seth, Regine, and Tomasz. The dialogue is fantastic and strikes just the right balance of witty and serious to keep me happy. Well except for Tomasz, “Who is talking like Polish stereotype, yes?” I might be biased on this point because my husband learned English the same Way Tomasz supposedly did, and while my hubby speaks perfect English, Tomasz, a supposed prodigal genius, talks in such a stilted way that it bugs the hell out of me.

But the world building is all…God, it’s so stupid. The world was ending, so the governments put everyone in virtual reality by force. No one is left outside, and despite all these people needing constant care, there’s only one robot caretaker for the entire population of a city? Seth somehow gets all his memories back, and in doing so, he’s able to interface with Tomasz and Regine just by touching their nodes. The explanation for these few characters being outside is that they injured their heads in a very specific way inside the system, which somehow broke the physical node in the real world despite their heads being laid on cushions. The sole caretaker then runs around hunting them down even though they’re dead inside the system for all intents and purposes, supposedly so it can kill them inside the system. Why? Hell if I know, because even if it doesn’t make sense, there’s no logic or reasoning to any of this. And even though they got kicked out of the system due to a busted data node, the devices still function as part of the plot device to tell the other characters’ histories.

If none of this makes sense in brief, don’t worry; it doesn’t make sense in the long version either. This whole book is like someone watched The Matrix and went “Ooh, I can do that story better.” But they couldn’t, and the result fills me with deeply conflicting emotions. As I said, the characters and dialogue are great, and I love that Seth is a gay protagonist without his sexuality being the focus of the story. But the actual story surrounding him and his new friends frustrates me for how dumb it is. Stuff just happens because it’s convenient and needs to happen to force the plot along. Seth even thinks this several times, but instead of making the story feel smart or meta, it comes across as lazy and poorly thought out.

All kinds of simple questions make this thing fall apart. If the system is meant to protect humanity, why isn’t there some kind of software override in the event of murders and abuse? How can the entire world be inside the system with no one left outside to maintain the systems, the power grid, or monitor the environment? How is it possible to maintain a worldwide network this large without someone on the outside to keep up repairs? Why is the sole robotic caretaker of the facility constantly patrolling for a few loose stragglers when they’re supposed to be cleaning up after humans and their offspring? How does one person interface with another and live their memories with no hardware built for such a purpose?

For all these questions I have, the story does ask them, but then shrugs, says, “I dunno,” and moves on. This is frustrating precisely because the character development is so, so good and I want to feel invested in the story. But the world building is extremely lazy, and once the big twist is revealed, my interest plummeted. I thought maybe I’d keep reading and there might be a clever twist that improves my impression, but that moment never came. If anything, the ending left me feeling even more frustrated because the writer paints Seth into a seemingly impossible corner and then just back off because reasons. No, those reasons aren’t given, and that sucks.

I’m giving More Than This 3 stars. The characters and dialogue in a more well-crafted setting would have earned a 5, but the crappy world building would have got a 2. So I’ll split the difference and call it done. I can’t say this is the last Patrick Ness story I’ll ever read, because clearly, he’s got some writing skills. But I’ll be wary of any future sci-fi stories from him.

Game review: Galak-Z for PS4

Galak-Z is a game I’ve been wanting to get from the first time I saw footage of the early alpha version, and I got even more excited when it was changed to a procedurally generated game, something that’s becoming one of my favorite buzz terms in gaming. So yes, this was a day one purchase for me, and…I want to like this game, even to love it, but my feelings are decidedly negative for a number of reasons.

First, I should cover what I like, and there is a lot to cover. Obviously, the graphics are fantastic, with the backgrounds being so pretty, I had to stop and stare at them on many levels. The ship’s design is also great, and all the enemy designs and the levels themselves are worthy of praise. There’s environmental hazards that can harm or hinder you, but that can also be used to trap or kill enemies.

The combat is gleefully varied, and there’s no one right way to approach fights. This is especially true after you get to the second season and unlock the mech transformation. Then you can choose to dogfight up close, take potshots from a distance while flying backwards and using juke to fly over the enemy’s bullets, use the robot’s grappling hand to grab enemies and slash them with a sword, use the same hand to throw explosive objects, or use the mech’s shield and sword to hack an enemy up close and personal-like. There may be many more methods to dispatching enemies that I don’t even know about, but those are the options I went with depending on the type of enemy I was facing and the number of enemies onscreen. It’s even possible to not fight at all and go all stealth on missions. There’s no one right way to play the game, just the way that feels right to you. That’s awesome.

The character designs are great in a cartoony kind of way, and I like their personalities. Well, I wasn’t so fond of General Akamoto, but it’s because he’s so dismissive of intelligence officer Beam, and he rarely gets A-Tak’s call sign right. (He calls A-Tak (short for Adam Takamoto) A-Taco, A-Taxi, A-Tuna and many other annoying variations.) His plans also suck, so it’s hard to believe he’s some legendary commander worthy of A-Tak’s idol worship.

The music is fantastic, the sound effects are great, and I like the voice acting. I also like how the same mission will often have a different set of dialogue so you don’t always have to hear the same things over and over. I think it’s cute how the worlds and levels of the game are divided into seasons and episodes, and how the end of a season goes to credits.

I’m more mixed on the controls, because I really would have liked the option to remap certain buttons. Also, there’s only one button for strafing, and you don’t get to pick which way it goes. This ended up being a really huge pain in the ass during parts of the game where I desperately needed to move one way, and I flail panicked because I was moving the wrong way. (Usually into lava, spike outcroppings, or a pod of shield-busting electrical sparks.)

BUT, for all these things I want to like, the game has a lot of problems, many of them not being mentioned by other reviewers. The biggest complaint I have is that the game is crash happy. It seemed like I’d just be getting somewhere in my progress to the final episode of a season, and right after winning a level, the game would crash and drop me back to the OS. Half the time, this meant I had to start a season over. Worse, the game also can crash and corrupt the save file, meaning you have to start all the way over, even doing the tutorial level again. Has even one other reviewer mentioned this in their glowing praise? Nope. Not a single one. And I don’t see how they could miss it because the game crashes for me four and five times per session.

Some of the reviewers have claimed there’s “some lag with many enemies on-screen” and I can say that’s not true either. There’s lag even when no enemies are on-screen, and the game can freeze up to two seconds with nothing happening. When you’re in the thick of actual combat, these lag and freeze moments are very frustrating because they’re almost constant. I hope this will be addressed in future patches because for now, the current patch does nothing to address the shoddy performance.

There’s also something to be said about the wonky way the shooting works, or doesn’t. Fitting myself into a tight corridor, I often took aim at an enemy in the distance only to have my bullets burst on the wall underneath me. Keep in mind, I’m not talking about an obstacle in my way. Even with space between the ship and the wall, it was nigh-impossible to get a clean shot. The analogue stick’s liberal interpretation of direction meant that even if I flew away from the wall and fired at an angle, I might fire off about a hundred rounds of ammo and still not hit my target. I’d fire over them, and then under, and then over again. But convincing the ship to aim between those two points was a chore every single time.

Much has been written on the enemy AI and how you can get enemies to fight with one another. I have yet to see this work out. It is possible to see one type of enemy cross paths with another and fight, but this is slow and painful to watch, with both groups jittering all over the screen, failing to kill each other for the longest time. I usually lost my patience and just went in to kill them all myself or just flew past them if I was low on health. They talk to each other constantly, and after repeating the same lines for a few minutes, it’s very irritating. (This is really a sticking point for me, too, the amount of radio chatter that constantly repeats. Say the line once for flavor, that’s fine. But repeating the same thing over and over and over is annoying.)

The thing is, when I actually tried to lose an enemy by leading them into another faction’s squad, what almost always happens is that they all start chasing me. I’ve often had a line of all three enemy factions on my tail, with not a one of them attacking each other. And if I should happen to luck out and get away, I can fly back and find all those enemies have gone back to their patrol routes with none of them engaging each other. The very few times I could get them to fight, they failed to kill one another and eventually lost interest and went their separate ways.

All the enemy types are fairly stupid creatures, and it’s possible to make them stick to walls and forget they were looking for you. I’ve seen the raiders blow themselves up by firing at a wall, and I’ve seen imperial fighters veer into lava, fly free from it, and then turn around and dive in it again. I don’t even have to do anything to these enemies. They’re simply too stupid to live.

The level designs all are the same, and there’s really only two mission types. You destroy an item or steal it. Sometimes you might be instructed to move the stolen item to another area, but it doesn’t make much variety in the game. Even the boss levels require you to go through the steal or destroy routine first. There is some variety in the enemy types, but in a lot of cases, it’s just a size variation or a change of paint schemes. You have to get used to hearing the same radio chatter a lot, because there aren’t that many voice actors. One of the raiders constantly says “heh heh heh!” and every time I heard that I alternated between repeating it myself or growling “Shut up!” (An option to turn off the enemy radio chatter but leave on the sound effects, vocal track, and music would have been greatly appreciated.)

But the number one biggest pet peeve I have about the game is the stinginess concerning items. The cost of the items is so ridiculously expensive that to just buy one item will require murdering almost every last enemy on a level. This isn’t so hard on the first world, but going into the second, third, and fourth, the game strips all items and upgrades from your ship while giving the enemies bigger guns, better ammo, better shields, and better armor. It gets to the point where they can wipe out your ship’s shield and take off hit points with one blow, but you have to shoot them forever to kill them. Most of the time, the only way to repair the ship is getting one hit point back in the shop. BUT sometimes, the game goes, “Fuck you, I won’t even let you repair that one hit point.” So if you lose three health points in the first level, there’s no guarantees you’ll be able to repair the ship even if you have the scrap to pay for it. And this is bullshitty bullshit. (Oh, and DO NOT get the Nuts and Bolts upgrade, because even if it restores one health point for each successful mission, it also means you will NEVER see the repair option again during that season, nor find repair kits in the supply crates.)

I suspect the reason this decision to strip all upgrades and items was made was because the makers realized anyone allowed to keep their items from the first world would finish the whole game in an hour, tops. Even a rank amateur like me could whip this game in a short time once I collect a few items to help even the odds. Rather than build a longer game with more mission variety and more level designs to keep things interesting, they chose to be cheap to pad the length. So instead of an hour, it took me five days to get through the four seasons.

Even that wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t for certain items showing up in the first level shops for a price you can’t possibly afford yet. A shield upgrade is 1200, so you go out in that first level, and you murder every last enemy to scrape together the scrap for that upgrade. Doing so takes forever because the bad guys are all bullet sponges with shields, and it takes forever to kill one, much less all of them. Then you get back to the shop on your home ship and…fuck you, it’s not there anymore. And you can go ahead and hold onto the money to buy it, but it will never appear again. The only time you’ll see it is when you can’t buy it. And fuck you for playing.

So now let me circle back to the crashing problem. I’m on world 3-4, and I finally find the shield upgrade in the shop in the level itself. So, knowing I won’t ever see it again, I fight and fight to get the scrap to buy it, finish the level, and the game fucking crashed on me AGAIN, taking the one item I so desperately needed to even the odds and starting me back at 3-1 with nothing all over again.

The other major annoyance to this item shop problem is blueprints. You have to collect blueprints to make items available in the shops, but once you move up to the next world you have to unlock them all over again. And many times, you might unlock an item and never, EVER see it in the shops, or in any of the ship upgrade crates scattered around the levels. I might forgive the items not being in the shops after I collected them the first time, but having to keep collecting the same blueprints over and over and still not see it in the shop? Oh man, that gives me such a huge hate boner.

There is a currency in the game called crash coins, purple coins that can allow you to restart an episode if you die. You need five to do so, but if you die and have only two or three coins, the shop keeper will exchange them for scrap. Given the rarity of these coins, you might think you’d get a lot of scrap in exchange for them. And you would be wrong. Sometimes it’s possible to start a new season and get absolutely nothing from the shop because you can’t afford anything. (To get the coins, you need to kill a lot of enemies, a task made progressively harder because you keep getting kicked down the ladder of progression while your enemies keep being given bigger guns and armor. It’s a nasty, spiteful, cheap tactic, and it sucks the joy out of this game like liposuction without anesthetic.)

Even if you do get to restart an episode, you lose everything until you can find a recovery crate in the game and get your stuff back. You can’t even transform until you get it back, so this means you have to spend a good fifteen to twenty minutes sneaking around to find the crate before you can even think to fight. I’m sure speed runners and hardcore players will scoff at this, but almost every level took me around thirty to forty minutes to complete. With the start of each season, I got into a pattern where I would make it through the first episode, only to be killed a few minutes into the second because the enemies are so overpowered and I had absolutely nothing to fight them with.

Taken in whole, this is easily the stingiest game I’ve ever played. I thought The Binding of Isaac was bad, but this is absolutely the worst I’ve ever seen. On my final session playing through season four, I couldn’t find any weapon upgrades except items to slow my rate of fire and shorten my firing range, and I had to resort to sneaking through every single level. This was vaguely amusing because I was using the grappling hand to grab boxes and angle them so the enemies couldn’t see me, but every supply crate and ship upgrade I found made me groan because it didn’t help. I had to resort to fighting the final boss with the pea shooter level gun.

The allure of most procedurally generated games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac is that you play the whole game over and over because you don’t know what combination of items you’re going to get this time. But you get to keep what you find all the way through to the final boss, and if you can stick it through the crappy items, eventually, you find something to make the game less difficult. Here, you may find a good combination, but you’re aren’t allowed to keep it from one world to the next. It’s stingy as hell, and it kills any desire in me to replay the game. When season five comes out, sure, I’ll play that and maybe give an updated review for the story. But I can’t see tormenting myself to play through the four seasons again. The effort to pad the game’s length is a huge turn off, and I see no reason to play a crash happy, laggy, stingy game again. I can say for certain that if the makers made an option allowing me to keep items between seasons, then yes, I’d certainly play the hell out of this game. They could keep the item stripping version as “hardcore mode.” But some of us would like our games to be fun, not punishing, and that’s all this game is, a punishment for spending my money based on hype.

In the end, I have to give Galak-Z 3 stars. This could have easily been a 5 star game, something I could pick up and play anytime like Spelunky or the endless mode in Super Stardust Delta. Hell, I even play The Binding of Isaac over and over even if it is brutally difficult, but the number of times I was having fun in Galak-Z are heavily outnumbered by the times I hated the game and wished to do physical bodily harm to the people behind this project. Maybe with a few patches, it will be more stable, but even that can’t convince me to play through again because I HATE the item shop and the increasingly unfair advantage given to the enemies while I’m forced to play with a pea shooter.

Game review: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls -Ultimate Evil Edition for PS4

Diablo II was one of my favorite games, and long after it came out, I was willing to come back and sink another couple hundred hours into playing through the various acts. I got even worse once I discovered character editors that would allow me to build the ultimate badass without having to grind for the right equipment.

But when Diablo III first came out, I downloaded the demo and walked away feeling dissatisfied with the changes made to it. When the game was released on PS4 under the extremely long title Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition, several reviewers said that this was the version to get, with further claims that the game felt completely different from its initial release. I was tempted by the fact that the console version didn’t have to always be online, and I found it on sale on the PSN store for almost half off.

I initially planned to wait to review this until after I had tried all the modes and difficulties. But after completing the full five acts with two characters and making several more runs with the other classes, I’ve reached a point where I can’t make myself play it anymore. It’s not a bad game, I suppose, but to me, it’s boring even on higher difficulty settings.

I will say that the controls are pretty good. I would have liked to swap the stick functions, but this was only an issue while playing the demon hunter, so it’s not a minor gripe. The face and shoulder buttons can be swapped, so it’s possible to use two or more spells from the same subset. The dodge function is pretty handy, and about the only problem I had was using the auto-aim to try and hit the right monster at the right time.

The graphics are certainly nice, and on my big screen TV, they really look fantastic and crisp. The locations all have a lot of detail that makes them a joy to explore. I frequently told hubby, “Well the art department certainly earned their paycheck.”

The writing department, however, did not. I cannot be surprised, because even the demo made it clear this would be more of the same story from Diablo and Diablo II. If there is a fourth game, I won’t be surprised to find a complete lack of writing creativity. But that’s a damn shame, because a game that has great graphics and great music is hurt by having a paint-by-numbers script that’s both predictable and dull.

It was not the story that burned me out on the game, though. What did that was the gameplay for most character classes. Once a character has enough spells to unlock all the buttons, I usually ended up only using one, with an occasional move to another button while waiting for the other spell or skill to recharge. Early levels made for more exciting controls, requiring constant dodging and strategy to take limited resources and crap armor into account. But once these problems are eliminated, it’s possible to just stand still in a swarm and waste them all without being challenged or put at risk of dying. On all of my playthroughs, I needed healing potions only a handful of times, and I only died in the early acts because of a lack of decent equipment.

There is one exception to this problem, and that’s the witch doctor. She (well, she in my game, anyway) has a ton of great spells, and it’s fun to set up patterns of attacks that tear apart whole rooms of enemies. This is why the witch doctor was one of two classes I took all the way to the end of the game. The only other class that I got close to the end was the monk.

The rest of this review is nitpicky as hell, but considering how much time I played, I made a lot of observations, most of them not good. So if you love Diablo III and don’t want to see me picking it apart, now’s a good time to cut out.

So, first of all, higher difficulty levels might bring more gold per kill, but they do not bring better loot, a problem that becomes apparent with every single class of character not using magic as their main attack. It is possible to be stuck with a lower level weapon with no alternatives being found for upwards of ten to fifteen levels, and this means that fights with even minor enemies begin to drag on and on. Higher difficulty levels also increases the number of minions who have special abilities and a crap-ton of hit points, and they bestow these abilities and higher hit points on all minions of the same type. This means a single skirmish can last five minutes not because of dodging or tactics, but because I’m just standing there hitting the same guy over and over and over. It makes for a very tedious game, and it’s rarely fun.

Crafting weapons with the blacksmith doesn’t address this issue, because often, I found myself stuck ten to fifteen levels under the required amount to get the next level of weapon. And once I had it, I only got a slight improvement in my damage output for one or two levels before I was back to the dull grind. This is true of most loot, but it is possible to coast on older armor until something good comes along. The need for better weapons is a handicap to most classes. I find it sad how after my first playthrough, I dismantled most loot for scrap because it served no useful purpose.

Fighting bosses with underpowered weapons, though, is a huge pain in the ass. I might have 37,000 armor points but only 500 attack points. This means the boss isn’t a threat and doesn’t require any strategy to defeat. I can stand in one place and hold down one button for the entire fight. But that fight will take thirty to forty minutes. It’s mind numbing and tedious, words that I think apply to most of the game.

At the higher difficulties, those gifted minions may have five or more spells that cast elements on the floor or spill poison or cast warp portals, and with three or more minions all casting the same spells, the screen becomes a wash of visual vomit so dense, I have trouble even finding my character.

The level designs are nice, but some of them drag on and on forever, making all the repeated fetch quests boring to complete. There’s never been much variety to Diablo quests, but by the third iteration, I’d hoped there might be some new ideas brought to the series, and instead it’s all more of the same.

The one level I really enjoyed was finding the portal to Whimsydale. This is a rainbow-saturated world full of teddy bears, walking flowers, and unicorns that burst with gory explosions when defeated. It’s all got a “so wrong it’s right” kind of vibe to it. When I ran across a unicorn named Sparkle Twilight with the special ability Friendship is Magic, I had to pause and put down the controller to laugh. (I’ve got a stuffed Twilight Sparkle pony on my bookshelf, as she’s my favorite pony. (Not because of her character but because I’m also a Twilight fan, and the name makes me laugh.))

And I’d be hard pressed to say anything nice about the clothing of the women characters. It’s kind of sad how if I go with a dude and pick up a pair of armored pants, they’re pants. But if I get the same armor for a woman, they’re booty shorts. While playing the demon hunter, I remarked to hubby, “Well at least she’s wearing pants…and high heeled boots.” Then I sighed heavily.

While I would agree that the console version is vastly different than the original PC release, Diablo III lacks the same addictive qualities that made the previous game so satisfying to me. As I said at the start, it isn’t a bad game, but it’s not something I feel like going back to. Even when I was playing it, I often had to force myself to do it. So I’ll give Diablo III 3 stars. I’m sure it appeals to lots of folks, but I’d rather play something a little more engaging.

Book review: Ghost Town by Rachel Caine

Yes, it’s another Morganville Vampires book review. For me these things are like text crack for so many reasons, but chief among them is that the series creates a world where vampires are well aware of their outnumbered position and are cautious to avoid being hunted to extinction. One thing that’s been a pet peeve of mine with the stereotypical vampire story is their indiscriminate killing sprees combined with the “What is this thing?!” trope. If a vampire left half as many drained, fang-pocked bodies lying around, there’s no way vampires could be a well kept secret, is there? And yet, the tired trope plays out over and over in horror.

But not in Morganville. Instead, the vampires have created a town where they rule silently over a population of humans who can’t leave thanks to a barrier created by a computer system augmented with a vampire’s brain. Or rather, that’s been the case for a long time, and in the last two books, the vampire brain who ran things went crazy and tried to expose the town with the help of an overly ambitious human. Ada, the vampire running the barrier, was rebooted, but ended up killing herself, leaving the town exposed.

So at the start of Ghost town, Claire is tasked with the impossible, creating a barrier to protect the town without using a brain. Myrnin, her vampire boss, helps her to craft a new system, but soon after it goes active, people begin going crazy. The machine affects both humans and vampires, and soon everyone is losing their minds, even elder vampires like Amelie. Claire must find a way to shut down the machine, a task made even more difficult because Myrnin has also lost his memories and has reverted into his former maddened state.

Before going into this book, I had a theory that I knew how the problem with the barrier would be resolved, but it turns out I was wrong, and the solutions at the end was something of a rude shock. But for the time being, the town is back under the barrier, and the vampires are safe from exposure.

There’s a few other twists that happen along the way, and those will have repercussions for later books, I’m sure. But I can’t talk about those without spoiling the story. But I will say, I think it’s funny how this is a series with amoral vampires hunting humans, and yet, I feel worried when bad stuff happens to them. That’s a pretty good story to make me worry about the monsters.

So, I’ll give Ghost Town 4 stars, and I’m already looking forward to starting the next book in the series, Bite Club. I’m pretty sure that will be my next review, but maybe I’ll try to read another book at the same time to break up all these Morganville Vampires reviews. That’s assuming that I can find the self-control to stop reading for few chapters and move to something else. It could happen, but then again, I am a happy vampire addict, so it might not. We’ll see how it goes.

Open call for beta readers

Last night I completed edits of my next release, a pair of sci-fi novellas titled Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning and Sex Doll Therapy and Rehabilitation, and I am now ready to look for beta readers.

These are sequels to the two novellas I released in 2011 under the combined title The Life and Death of a Sex Doll. The first two books followed the development of Ashley Braun, a Sensu-Doll modified to act as a daughter to a lonely stock broker, Kelly Braun. Being raised as a family member made Ashley a unique entity, a cybernetic companion given more independence than most of her factory built “relatives.” The first two books offered an often humorous and almost utopian view of the future, with several critics calling the ending of the second novella a bit too sweet and perfect.

The opening chapters of Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning returns to Ashley’s story ten years later, troubled by a marriage that is losing its spark because her husband Brian begins looking for another woman to have children with. This leads Ashley to leave him and return to living with her parents, and Kelly, now the president of the Sensu-Doll corporation, offers Ashley the chance to raise a child of her own. In addition to the challenges of family life, Ashley again becomes the target of an anti-technology cult. When her daughter is put in danger, she sets out on a new mission to redefine the laws governing all cybernetic companions.

Then in Sex Doll Therapy and Rehabilitation, Ashley’s daughter Colleen inspires her to open a radical center dedicated to caring for neglected and abused companions, bringing her into contact with other companions modified to look like children for twisted and violent fantasies. Her promotion of the charity forces her into the media spotlight to contend with influential opponents, and in the wake of a tragedy, Ashley takes on a dangerous role as an activist for cybernetic civil rights.

Together, these two stories explore the more troubling aspects of a modern society able to purchase and groom intimate partners, topics that were only mentioned in passing in the first two novellas, and they follow Ashley’s struggles to redefine her existence in a world that treats all cybernetic entities as disposable appliances.

If you are interested in being a beta reader, please email me at zoe_whitten(at)yahoo(dot)com. This offer is available until the end of August, and I hope to get enough feedback to polish the stories for release in October or November. Reading the first two novellas is not a requirement of joining in the beta reading group, but it may help readers understand Ashley and her unique perspective.

Visual art: Alexander Jansson

Here’s yet another artist I’ve found on Facebook, which is becoming my site for finding pretty/weird things to admire. (And you thought it was just for cat pictures.) This particular artist’s site also brought me an update I didn’t expect in the form of a book cover for the next John A. Lindqvist novel. (SQEEEEEEEE!) It’s called Himmelstrand, and from little news I can find online, the English title should be We the Infected. Definitely looking forward to getting my hands on that whenever it comes out.

You can check out his portfolio and bio at http://www.alexanderjansson.com/

In other news, yes, I know my updates are real slow these days. I’m trying to stick to editing during my waking hours. I’ve just finished editing In the Mouth of the Wolf (Alice the Wolf book 3) and have sent it off to my beta reader. I still have to work my way through books 4 and 5, and then I have to get the last Sex Doll novella edited and emailed to the beta reader.

I am currently playing Witcher 3 and Diablo 3, but I don’t expect to have a review for either for quite some time. Sorry about that. But there should be another book review in a week or so. (Another Morganville Vampires book, big shock.) Eventually, I hope to get to more frequent updates, so I hope you’ll bear with me during this slow update period.